Ep. 1167 - Reasons for optimism & concern for 2026 Illini football
Illini Inquirer Podcast: An Illinois Fighting Illini athletics podcast
247Sports, Illinois, Illinois Football, Illinois Basketball, Illinois Athletics, College Football, C
4.9 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2026
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Illini Inquirer's Jeremy Werner and Joey Wagner react to Illinois firing softball coach Tyra Perry and EIU athletic director Tom Michael re-joining the Illini athletic department as Josh Whitman's No. 2. The guys then break down their top reasons for optimism and top reasons for concern for the 2026 Illinois football team.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome in to the online inquire podcast. |
| 0:14.8 | And it's Jeremy Warner and Joy Wagner coming to you on this Tuesday morning. |
| 0:19.0 | We got some newsy stuff we got to get to. Illinois makes a |
| 0:22.6 | coaching change with softball. Alana golf had kind of an epic comeback that just fell short. |
| 0:28.4 | Alana men's tennis. Get to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 2021. Tom Michael is back. Mark Tarasani, |
| 0:35.4 | out of the football program. We got a lot to get to, Joy. No, we're going to main thing in this podcast. We're going to do reasons for optimism, reasons for concern for Illinois football heading into the summer. We got a lot to get to. I thought this was going to be a slow news week. But Illinois kind of giving us some admin news here. Yeah, there's a lot going on. Yesterday I checked my phone. I'm like, whoa, Tyra Perry's out. Mark Parsani's headed to Oklahoma, and we're still going to talk a little bit of football because I'd like to do that more. Yeah, we've done so much basketball here, and I get it. That's what's going to drive people. We're going to get more views and listens and downloads and all that stuff. |
| 1:13.9 | But I want to talk to Illinois football, too, because that program is so important. |
| 1:17.3 | And it's going through so much change this offseason. |
| 1:20.4 | So I just did my summer school hit with Bud Elliott. |
| 1:24.1 | And it's always kind of a nice reminder and refresher to kind of zoom out with football. |
| 1:28.1 | So we'll do that with our reasons for optimism and concern here. |
| 1:32.1 | But this had kind of been brewing for a couple years now, Joey, that Illinois would make a softball coaching change here. |
| 1:39.4 | Because at one point, when everything else was losing, the major sports were basically losing. |
| 1:45.2 | Tyra Perry was a real bright spot of this athletics department. |
| 1:48.9 | Getting to the Antsailbole tournament four times in her first six full seasons, take out the |
| 1:52.7 | COVID year. |
| 1:53.5 | So four times in the first six seasons. |
| 1:55.6 | But the last four years have just been bad. |
| 1:58.6 | It felt like, and this is just me from the outside, they lose a pitching |
| 2:02.3 | coach and everything went downhill from there and they could just never kind of reestablish themselves. |
| 2:07.8 | Three straight losing seasons or four straight losing seasons in the Big Ten, three straight |
| 2:11.4 | losing seasons overall and just really uncompetitive during those final four seasons, |
... |
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